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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
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Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Available
Ambition
Destiny
Simple
Problem
Destinies
Arithmetic
Ambitions
Grand
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton
The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
Alain de Botton
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
Alain de Botton
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
Alain de Botton
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Alain de Botton
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton
Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
Alain de Botton
The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
Alain de Botton
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
Alain de Botton
We should not be frightened by appearances.
Alain de Botton